With the popularity of on-demand, Internet-based entertainment content providers, television audiences are progressively drifting away from the more traditional model of consuming static television program schedules to Internet video broadcasting. This trend challenges content producers and advertisers, since Internet audiences tend to be much more segmented, scattered, and non-uniform in terms of the date and time that they consume a given content item. While Internet advertising tends to be much more targeted than television advertising, television remains a powerful broadcast mechanism in which a content provider is sure to concentrate audiences according to program schedules. For this reason, despite using data to a lesser extent, television remains an important way to connect advertisers with large audiences.
Nevertheless, there are lessons to be learned with the more targeted advertising model of the Internet. Internet-based channels, for example, started to create new content by applying the same techniques that allow advertisers to monitor the return of investment (ROI) of their advertisements. In such a case, a content producer analyzes the interests of strategic audience segments and creates content that can potentially appeal to them, indirectly satisfying advertisers interested in reaching such segments.
In order to compete with and complement the Internet advertising model, television content producers are trying to prove their value to advertisers in new data-driven ways, using audience-related data in ever earlier stages of content planning. A need therefore exists for improved techniques for addressing content production based on audience rating data analysis and the interests of advertisers.